Injured Ego

Injury is my least favorite topic, personally and within the pages of Running Times. I'd rather publish inspiring stories of success than dwell on all the aches and pains that beset us. But the fact remains: Most runners get injured. Studies show that more than half of all runners suffer an injury every year; some say far more than half. An oft-cited 1992 study claimed that girls cross country had the highest injury rate of any scholastic sport.

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Watching the college bowl season soon before putting this issue together, I marveled at that last statistic. One reason for these high rates of injury, it seems, is due to the fact that running is flying. If an airplane has anything wrong with it, a slight hiccup in the engine, a door that won't quite close, a sticking flap -- it doesn't take off. Yet we can and do drive a car with similar problems for years. In sport, a football player with a "tight hamstring" can execute at a high level for a few seconds of a play, then hobble back to the huddle, or to the sidelines for stretching, taping or whatever else is necessary to get him back in for another explosive effort. A distance runner with the same tightness is injured -- quickly off the back of the pack if he or she started the race at all. Thus, the level of injury that gets reported or referred to a doctor would seem much higher in running.

This might explain some of the disparity in injury rates between sports, but it doesn't shed much light on why runners get injured in the first place. Ours is a noncontact sport and so fundamental, that 3-year-olds do it constantly unless told not to.

The answer to this question is complex, and we asked senior writer Phil Latter to look at it from a big-picture perspective, drawing on athletes, coaches, biomechanists, physical therapists and sport psychologists in his story "Rethinking Running Health" (starting on page 42 of the print issue). In my experience we get injured mostly because our egos are fragile. We're so wrapped up in our running that we're afraid to take a day off, run less, run slower, or, heaven forbid, take a walk on days our bodies tell us we're not recovered enough for our "usual" workout. We're afraid someone will think less of us as a runner; we're afraid we'll think less of ourselves. And, backing off at all scares us that we'll become less of a runner than we believe we are, than we have already set ourselves up to be.

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Our fragile egos also make us afraid to accept and deal with problem areas before they become disabling injuries. Anything less than 100 percent is seen as a weakness and taking proactive measures a sign of wimpiness. We're embarrassed to pay any attention to a pain until we're seriously injured and can't run at all. A broken foot is more honorable than an ambiguous "stress reaction," even if it takes weeks longer to heal when we finally decide to treat it. That, and we're afraid of the possibility of injury, believing if we ignore the problem it won't be real and will disappear.

Latter proposes a new perspective on injury, not black or white, yes or no, but a continuum between pain-free and hobbled. Maybe we start to accept that injury is part and parcel of life, that the training process itself involves injury and recovery.

German Fernandez, subject of our cover story, is a good example of this. Fernandez alternated between record performances and dropping out of races during his time at Oklahoma State. Now a pro, he's finding ways to manage and deal with the injury inherent in pursuing the sport at this level.

I'm going to try to adopt this more in my running -- starting with getting a "prehab" evaluation of any weaknesses or areas for concern before ramping up my miles this spring. And while I still think the best place for detailed advice about specific injuries is on our website -- you can find the right article by looking under "Where Do You Hurt?" -- we won't shy away from injury in our pages either. Instead we'll see it as part of the success stories we celebrate, in our heroes and ourselves.

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